Electric computer games, Beast Mastery hunting and obscure references

What is going on with the Hunter community at the moment? Now I don’t know if this is true of other areas in the WoW-blogosphere, but we seem to be hemorrhaging hunter-bloggers like the servers are going down tomorrow. Pike’s the most obvious (to me) recent example but everywhere I look, people are off. Some for good, some maybe for good.

No sooner do I discover The Hunting Lodge than Brigwyn announces his retirement from hunter-blogging. I really regret that I didn’t start reading THL sooner. Essentially, most of my (admittedly fairly limited) reading list is gone. BRK and Klinderas, a while back. Now Pike, Brigwyn, Negathle. Have Blizzard utterly ruined the Hunter class at some point and I’ve not noticed? Is this merely coincidence? Discontent with the general direction of the game? General WoW fatigue?

Admittedly, I’ve just come out of a several-month WoW break myself, but at no point did I make a conscious decision that “I’m not playing this game any more”. Something happened to cause all these people to stop playing and writing.

Net result: I feel pretty lonely. All of the truly excellent writers who have shared their experiences and love for the class with me are no longer there, and here I am. Me, with potentially A Reader and without Pike’s writing style or Brigwyn’s charisma.

Where to from here, then? Well, Windpaw‘s still about (thank Elune), as is pet-mistress Mania. Then there’s Rilgon, of course – he may be Marksman, but he’s a spec-loyalist too. He seems to have got himself embroiled in some kind of politics vs. Frostheim, which is regrettable. I find he’s not as easy to read as the others, but his attitude of “it’s not about the exact way you do things, it’s that you try” makes a lot of sense to me. I guess my next move is to hit up everyone’s blogroll and find a few hunter-bloggers who’re still about and see if I like their style.